Question 2
Mead discusses food rituals of the rich, “conspicuous destruction of food, piled up for prestige, oil poured on the flames of self-glorifying feasts, food left to rot after it was offered to the gods.” What type of modern-day examples do you think parallel these historical examples of food waste? Find and post two examples. Provide explanations for each example. Cite your sources.
Mead states, “Divorced from its primary function of feeding people, treated simply as a commercial commodity, food loses this primary significance.” She continues by stating, “Only by treating food, unilaterally, as a substance necessary to feed people, subject first to the needs of people and only second to the needs of commercial prosperity…can we hope to meet the ethical demands that our present situation makes on us. For the first time since the beginning of civilization, we can feed everyone, now…The temptation is to turn aside, to deny what is happening to the environment…to argue about legalities while people starve and infants and children are irreparably damaged, to refuse to deal with the paradoxes of hunger in plenty, and the coincidences of starvation and overnutrition.” Find and explain two examples that support and/or discredit Mead’s claims. Cite your sources.
Question 3
Mead focuses much of the article on children and the need to feed children to protect the future of our world.
She claims that we currently have the ability to feed everyone in the world, to prevent all children from going hungry. Is she correct? Find two sources of evidence that supports or discredits her claim. Explain. Cite your sources.
She provides examples of children from different times and places who arrived at school too hungry to learn. Does this exist in the United States today? If so, what are we doing about it? If not, why not – how has the problem been fixed? Find two sources of evidence that support your claims. Explain. Cite your sources.
Question 4
Mead blames the problem of hungry people on two conditions: “The increase in the diseases of affluence and the growth of commercial agriculture.”
In regards to “the diseases of affluence,” she states, “we have in the United States a situation not unlike the situation in Germany under Hitler, when a large proportion of decent and law-abiding simply refuse to believe that what is happening can be happening. ‘Look at the taxes we pay,’ they say, or they point to the millions spent on welfare; surely with such quantities assigned to the poor, people can’t really be hungry, or if they are, it is because they spend their money on TV sets and drink. How can the country be overnourished and undernourished at the same time?”
What effect is Mead creating when she compares the United States to Germany under Hitler’s rule?
Provide two current examples, regarding hunger in the U.S., that show people refuse to believe what is happening.
In regards to “the increasing magnitude of commercial agriculture,” Mead states, “the subsidies go to the rich commercial farmers, many of them the inheritors of old exploitive plantation traditions, wasteful of manpower and land resources, often in the very countries where the farmworkers, displaced by machinery, are penniless, too poor to move away, starving. These subsidies exceed the budget of the antipoverty administration.” Is she correct? Find evidence that supports or discredits her claim. Explain. Cite your sources.
